Holly Herndon

Somewhere between a music composition class at Stanford and a never-ending Berlin club night lies electronic auteur Holly Herndon. She talks to Lindsay Zoladz about mixing academia and pop, the power of Skrillex, and techno showers.

About a third of the way through my Skype conversation with electronic experimentalist Holly Herndon, our connection starts breaking up. It feels uncannily timed, given that we were just talking about Donna Haraway's influential essay "A Cyborg Manifesto" and the way it inspired Herndon's debut album Movement-- a combination of steely, avant-garde abstractions and visceral, trance-like beats that interrogate the relationship between man and machine. As her voice shatters into glitchy fragments through my computer speakers ("h-h-h-e-e-l-l-o?"), it sounds, actually, a lot like one of her songs.

Herndon is calling from a music room at Stanford (she picks up her laptop to show off the state-of-the-art equipment; "I'm sitting in a multi-channel room right now! There are speakers everywhere!" she reports excitedly) where the Tennessee native has just started a PhD in music composition. A recent graduate of Mills College's electronic music program, Herndon also spent some formative time DJing in Berlin's infamously hard-partying clubs; her music reflects a wide array of interests, ideas, and life experiences. But she says Movement feels like the first thing she's composed that's a true synthesis of her many sides. "I'm a multi-faceted person," she says. "I used to feel awkward about all the different worlds I operate in, but now I'm like, 'Screw it, I'm just going to make this project who I am.'"

Pitchfork: You're coming from a very academic background, but do you see a dichotomy between "academic music" and "non-academic" music, or do you think that boundary is starting to break down?

Holly Herndon: That divide definitely still exists, but I don't think it has to, and I try not to have it exist in my work. That's not the world that I want to occupy. There's validity in the fact that some of the musician/engineers here at Stanford are spending all their time in highly intellectual music research. That's amazing and it should happen; pop music is amazing and should also happen. And there's a whole spectrum in between. I like to know what the super-techy people are developing, and I want to work with these new tools and present them in a way that other people can understand and celebrate.

On Movement, there's one dance track, and then there's one super experimental track, but that's what my life playlist looks like anyway. Most people are eclectic these days. Listening experiences are shuffled, whether it be on YouTube or on a blog-- listeners are now more open to hearing that kind ebb and flow on a record.

Pitchfork: Movement is one of those records that transforms completely depending upon where you're hearing it. I listened to it on headphones while walking down a busy street yesterday, and then today on a stereo in a quiet room, and it almost sounded like an entirely different record. Do you think a lot about the space and context in which people are going to listen to your music?

HH: Definitely. Last year I released an experimental tape on Third Sex called Car, and it was written specifically to listen to while you're driving-- I was playing with car sounds and the acoustics of a small space. With Movement, the biggest concern was frequency range and how people would be listening. I was thinking, "When people listen on laptops as opposed to a proper system with a subwoofer, what's going to be missing?" I didn't want to compromise the overall vision just because some people will be hearing it as mp3s on laptop speakers, but I also don't want to be like, "You must listen to it in this way." I don't want to exclude anyone. So I tried to find that balance of being able to have all the really low frequencies that I want while remaining accessible to people with different kinds of set-ups.

Pitchfork: You've spent some time in Berlin-- is the club scene there as crazy as its reputation leads people to believe?

HH: It's definitely very different from every American scene I've ever been involved in. It's extremely hedonistic, all or nothing. It's more than just, "Oh, you'll party until 9 a.m." It's more like, "You'll party for three days." The party stops Tuesday morning. It's insane.

But I also found it incredibly mixed in terms of social strata-- you had really rich people and working class people all together enjoying this amazing music. It's also really casual in a way that I find American nightlife is not. There's no last call. There's no one nannying you the way you have in American clubs. You know, you'll just be getting into it and some guy will come around with a flashlight and be like, "It's 2 a.m., put your drink down!" It completely ruins whatever otherworldly experience you might be having at that moment. So I really appreciated that casual nature.

Pitchfork: What brought you to Berlin originally?

HH: I was an exchange student the first time I went to Berlin, when I was 16. I remember hearing trance music for the first time. I'm from Northeast Tennessee, where everything's kind of organic and acoustic. That's kind of the tradition that I grew up around. So to go somewhere where everything's hyper-synthetic and euphoric was just really compelling to me, because it was so different. And then I took some classes in electronic music as an undergrad, where we learned how to use modular synthesizers. As soon as I graduated, I moved to Berlin and just started making music.

Electronic music is such a normal part of life there. Here, it's this whole other thing, but there it's, like, played in the supermarket. I remember visiting my ex-boyfriend's mom in Southern Germany and she would go into the bathroom to take a shower and turn on hard techno. [laughs] I thought that was amazing.

Pitchfork: The popularization of EDM has gotten so much attention in the U.S. over the last few years, and I've heard a lot of Europeans laughing about how behind the curve we are.

HH: It's kind of hilarious. It's been mainstream in Europe for at least 20 years. But it's awesome that the U.S. is branching out beyond traditional rock instrumentation. I'm really excited about that, and also I feel like venues are starting to change, too. If Skrillex was what was needed to get that going, then more power to him, I guess!

Pitchfork: Have you played this new material live yet?

HH: All of the pieces on the album have come out of a live context-- that's how I start my writing process. I'll have an idea, sketch something out, and then perform it in whatever unfinished state it's in. Then I'll take the feedback from that performance and sculpt that into a piece. Interestingly enough, when I do more abstract or non beat-based pieces in a club environment, people are really responsive. I've been really impressed by how sophisticated audiences are these days. People can shift gears. I played a show in Berlin this summer, and I was like, "Oh, it's a club, there must be a beat at all times." It was actually an awful show, because I was trying to fill everything in with this 4/4, and it just sounded dumb. When I'm actually true to the material and allow breaks and pauses, it works a lot better.